However, in order give the site more focus, and in line with the Unix philosophy of trying to "do one thing and do it well", independent sites are now being removed. I’m really sorry to see some of my favourite independent sites go, but searching all good personal sites is hopefully a much more achievable goal for a spare-time project than searching all good personal and independent sites. If someone wants to set up an instance just for independent sites I’d be happy to send the list for an initial import. That might even provide an opportunity to resurrect the original idea of building one front-end to pull together results from multiple search instances each indexing their own specialist niches, thereby allowing the building a federated search for all the small islands of "good stuff" that do remain if you know where to find them. That’s from Search My Site - open-source search engine for personal and independent websites which made the Hacker News (HN) home page on 25 Mar 2025. This generated some useful feedback, my favourite being "I like this, thank you!

One interesting difference is that 3 years ago I had loads of direct emails but this time no emails whatsoever (and only 1 direct message on Mastodon). The server also handled the load just fine. Usage has now largely returned to normal (approx 30 real users a day and approx 1000 a month), and unfortunately the activity in March didn’t lead to new subscriptions. There were however over 200 new sites submitted in the space of just a few days, leading to another milestone - the 3000th site was indexed on 25 Mar 2025. This is good because more content should lead to better search results. For reference, the 1000th site was on 12 Mar 2022 and the 2000th site was on 16 Dec 2023, which is a reminder that the user-submitted-sites model is something of a slow grower. It is also worth noting that although there are (currently) 3,271 sites indexed, there are actually (currently) 4,327 sites in the database, and a part of that difference is sites which were indexed and then later deindexed. As discussed in Some of the challenges of building an internet search, the Top Source Media online 2 reasons for sites being deindexed are sites going offline (currently 187), and sites starting to block indexing via their robots.txt (currently 15). Will be interesting to see if the robots.txt blocking increases over time with sites trying to block the big AI crawlers. In 2023 vector embeddings and a self-hosted LLM were deployed to experiment with "retreival augmented generation". Unfortunately the results, at least with the small self-hosted LLM, were not that great. Also, it did add to running costs and complexity, which is a particular concern given that most days around 99.99% of traffic is just bots rather than real people. So the functionality was never fully released. Further work has been undertaken in 2025 to remove this.

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